$266 for an Intel Core 2 Quad. Anandtech has a great chart comparing the equivalently priced Core 2 Duo (which is clocked faster) across of a variety of threaded workloads. For rendering/media apps, the quad is 10-20% faster. For games, the dual core is faster across the board still.

Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent Intel's positions, strategies, or opinions.

http://myevilprocessor.blogspot.com/200 ... 512mb.html - prerelease benchmarks have it stomping the 8800 GTS. I think it may be cheaper, though it's hard to sort through all the rumors. ATI is said to be launching a competitive card for Christmas as well. Christmas 2007 may be a very good time to buy a graphics card.

8800 GT also has the HD playback (h.264 and VC-1(?)) that the 8800 GTX/GTS lack. And it is a single-slot card.

The 256MB is definitely going to be cheaper than the 8800 GTS 320MB, which you can buy for $290. I haven't been able to find the price differential between the GT 256 and the GT 512. I suspect both are going to be really good buys.

One caveat is that these cards don't support DX10.1 (I think). No idea if that's going to be significant or not.

I think I will be getting one of these as soon as there is a fanless or super quiet version.

If they don't release some samples soon, there's not gonna be a holiday release and very likely more of a loss for AMD... Really, I doubt they're gonna get enough volume out the door even if they start releasing now. They'll probably only get a few tens of thousands of cards made at best right now unless they've got a big warehouse full of them already. That's probably not the case now that nVidia's made their release. It's not like this is gonna be a Wii vs PS3 vs Xbox360 type deal where people wait in line for Wii's while xboxes and ps3s sit on shelves since MS was smart and made directx the monopoly portion of the gaming stack that everyone else designs towards. I wonder if MS will start charging royalties or something. Probably not now that the EU is fining them, but who knows what the future will bring.

Drop dead shipping date for a holiday release is the week of Thanksgiving. You can launch whenever, but if you don't ship by Thanksgiving no one will be able to get their hands on any in quantity. So you're right, they've only got three weeks left.

Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent Intel's positions, strategies, or opinions.

At first Phenom was going to launch at either 2.8GHz or 2.6GHz; then we got word that it would be either 2.6GHz or 2.4GHz. A week ago the story was 2.4GHz and lower, then a few days ago we got the final launch frequencies: 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz.
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The problem is, and I hate to ruin the surprise here, Phenom isn't faster than Intel's Core 2 Quad clock for clock. In other words, a 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 will set you back at least $283 and it's slower than a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Quad Q6600, which will only cost you $269. And you were wondering why this review wasn't called The Return of the Jedi.